• Everybody is leaping a tall building today — we couldn’t find anything going on. Perhaps it’s all in anticipation of fireworks tomorrow?
If anyone knows of something, let us know and we’ll update the page. Email us at events@peekskill.rocks

What’s Peekskill Rocks without rocks? We don’t know… because there are more rocks coming! Space rocks, that is.

The Perseid shower often produces 50 to 100 meteors per hour in a dark sky at the peak. And we should be able to see it from Peekskill, but hopefully we won’t have to play dodge ball with them.
Since the moon is waning right now, we should have a great viewing opportunity, providing clouds don’t get in the way. The best times that I’ve been able to extrapolate from various souces is about 2:00 am, Thursday morning and after 8:45 pm Thursday night. Look to the constellation Perseus in the Northeast.

In general, the Perseid meteors tend to be few and far between at nightfall and early evening and don’t really start to pick up steam until after midnight. For you night owls, the usually don’t bombard the sky in force until just before dawn. Think 2:00 – 4:00 am.

“Try to view the Perseids as far away from artificial lights as possible,” Bill Cooke of NASA wrote in a blog post. “The darker the sky, the better viewing experience you can have. Lie on the ground and look straight up.”

The Peekskill meteorite is among the most historic meteorite events on record.[1] Sixteen separate video recordings document the meteorite burning through the Earth’s atmosphere, whereupon it struck a parked car in Peekskill, New York.[2] Peekskill is an H6 monomict breccia;[3] its filigreedtexture is the result of the shocking and heating following the impact of two asteroids in outer space.[4] The meteorite is of the stony variety and approximately 20% of its mass is tiny flakes of nickel-iron.[5] When it struck Earth, the meteorite weighed 26 pounds (12 kg) and measured one foot in diameter. The Peekskill meteorite is estimated to be 4.4 billion years old.[6]The meteorite fell on October 9, 1992 – an event witnessed by thousands across the East Coast.

The meteorite fell on October 9, 1992 – an event witnessed by thousands across the East Coast. Numerous residents of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.described the “huge greenish fireball.”[7] The meteorite broke up over Kentucky and passed over West Virginiaand Pennsylvania on its north-northeast trajectory before striking a parked 1980 red Chevy Malibu [see photo below] at approximately 7:50 pm EDT. After traveling through space at a cosmic velocity of 8.8 miles per second, the speed of the meteorite at impact had slowed to 164 miles per hour.[8]

Take it away, Wikipedia: “Eighteen-year old Michelle Knapp, the car’s owner, heard the collision from inside her home. She later described the sound as “like a three-car crash”. Hurrying outside to investigate the noise, Knapp found her car smashed and the 26-pound meteorite, still warm and smelling of sulfur, beneath it.” Photo of Knapp and her meteored Chevy Malibu by John Bortle.